Backend Software Engineer

tails.com is a tech-centric startup, using the power of technology combined with applied nutritional science to change the world of dog food for good.

We launched to the public in July 2014. We’re proud members of the TechCity Future Fifty, a prestigious network of the UK's fastest growing tech companies, and are #4 in the Startups 100 index of exciting UK startups to watch. We also scooped a whole bunch of awards at the 2016 and 2017 Startups Awards, including Tech Business of the Year.

The challenge

4 million. That’s how many meals we deliver every single month, and we’re just getting started. Imagine a world where what you feed your dog is being as carefully optimised as the recommendation engine for what to watch next on Netflix. Well that world exists - we’re creating it right now.

So where do you come in? Turn 4 million into 4 billion. We’ll need new nutrition algorithms that handle more types of food. We’ll need better pricing engines for value engineering. And we’ll need to keep making sure our customer experience is top of the line in a constantly evolving E-commerce world.

About you

We're looking for someone who has a passion for technology, who gets a kick out of collaborating across the business to build products and features that our customers love.

Our current team has backgrounds in various programming languages. What is common is a hunger to learn new technology. Our tech stack is predominantly Python, so we expect you to learn Python. However, just like the technology we use, we are a company that is evolving constantly, and we expect you evolve and learn with us.

In this role you will...

build robust backend services as part of our event-driven architecture

collaborate in autonomous squads to deliver high impact features that our customers love

lead best practices ensuring appropriate testing and great software engineering

contribute, both in ideas and execution, to the ongoing evolution of the platform architecture

guiding and mentoring other members of the team, sharing knowledge and challenging appropriately…

refine the skills and techniques necessary to take the next step in your career, whether that’s leading a team, architecting complex systems or just being the best developer you can be

Tech Stack

Our tech stack is Python (Flask + SQLAlchemy + Celery) on the backend along with a smattering of Go, with Redis, DynamoDB, MySQL and S3 for data storage.

The platform is comprised of resilient and scalable applications and services powered by AWS with a mixture of Elastic Beanstalk, AWS Lambda, CloudFormation and EC2 Container Service (introducing Kubernetes with EKS).

We have a propensity to ship early and often, so we push multiple deployments live per day through our CI/CD pipelines using Codeship.

Extra credit if you...

feel queasy at the thought of working without proper CI/CD

are cautiously excited about the impending serverless revolution

consider automated infrastructure provisioning a solved problem

give back to Open-Source as a maintainer or contributor

What we’re offering

Fantastic development opportunities within a high-growth business

Learning & Development budget for training, conferences, books, etc.

Competitive salary and very generous share awards package

25 days of holiday which increases up to 26 days after 2 years of service and 27 days after 3 years of service